An approach to lean UX

What is Lean UX

Traditional UX methodologies don’t cope well with agile environments in which the fast pace of work don’t provide much time for the initial research required. Additionally, as the software industry evolves, more and more development teams tend to move towards a much more agile approach moving away from the traditional waterfall approach. This trend in the software industry hightlights the need for a different UX approach which still puts the user in the center of the process but in a much more agile, effective way.

It is in the context, that lean UX takes importance. As Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf stated on their book Lean UX “The team’s focus should be on learning which features have the biggest impact on its customers. The artifacts the team uses to gain and communicate that knowlege are irrelevant”.

What is design thinking

Design thinking is an iterative process which brings traditional designers methods of working to any discipline that you want to apply. Its iterative character makes it a good foundation to sort out one of the main issues the waterfall methodology brought: lack of flexibility to changes in requirements as well as a good foundation to bring closer UX to agile.

Standford d.school Design Thinking Process

The design thinking process is made of several stages which vary attending to different autors. Stages proposed by the Standford d.school, one of the most relevant design schools, are 5: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test:

The main difference with traditional approaches is that apart from its iterative character, stages doesn´t really need to be strictly performed in this order, adapting the sequence and tasks at each stage attending to the situation and the team needs.

Implementation of lean UX

The implementation proposed by Desiree Sy and supported by Jakob Nielsen works as follow:

Sprint 0: the UX research should start earlier than development as the UX team should work one sprint ahead than the development team. This sprint 0 (longer than other sprints) will be use in order to identify stakeholders, personas, gather requirements and narrow down the MVP.
Sprint 1: During sprint one, prototypes for sprint 2 are developed while gathering new requirements for future sprints.
Sprint i: Design prototypes for sprint i+1, evaluate the outcome of sprint i-1 and gather requirements for sprint i+2.

This implementation has been highly critized as it doesn´t support some of the main principles of lean UX as it gives the impression of creating two different lyfe cycles of the same project compromising comunication, placing in a more relevant place deliverables than it should. It is for this reason that we´ll use an hybrid implemetation which adapts better to changes in requirements and priorities.

With this approach UX deliverables act as a tool, allowing different members of the team to work over them in order to identify business requirements, users needs and technical limitations. In this way prototypes are seen much more as an alive document than as a final deliverable completed and handed to developers before they start coding.

Spring 0: identify main stakeholders, requirements, main personas, main use cases and main user flows in order to identify and narrow down the MVP.
Design Sprint: when required sprints will be more focus on creating prototypes, wireframes and gather feedback around them from different stakeholders.

Evaluation Sprint: evaluation sprints takes place at any time in the process via prototypes, functional prototypes or with the application itself in order to proof hypothesis .
Hybrid Sprints: when required, both design and evaluation tasks will take place in the same sprint.

Requirements for future desings are gather during each sprint, differentiating in between requirements for new features, requirement changes, additional requirements for an existing feature, which respectively serves to feed new features, change existing desings or changes in the product, prioritized accordingly to the situation.

UX Techniques

The UX techniques applied as well as how and up to which grade it is decided attending to the situation, priorities, severity of the problem to tackle and team needs, as follow:

Requirements gathering: workshops, interviews with stakeholders and users, focus group, competitor analysis.
Evaluation: experts review, usability testing.
Desing: card sorting, prototyping, wireframes, ideation workshops, mock ups, style guides.

Outcome and next steps

During the planning a number of milestones will be identified (alfa, beta, MVP launch…). Additionally a number of specific UX activities will be identified attending to the character of the project as well as during the development future recommendations and future steps.

Have you ever experienced issues when bringing together traditional design lifecycles and agile methodolies? Did you have to apply lean UX at some point in your career? Do you have any questions or concerns about lean UX? If so, please do leave a comment below or get in touch with us. All experiences and questions are worthy to share to learn from each other.

If you like this article you might be interested in UX techniques, keep reading Heuristic evaluation: usability first and an approach to user testing.

Where to learn more

To learn more about lean UX I highly recommend reading “Lean UX: Designing great products with agile teams” by Heff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.

Reading and taking courses is always good specially at the beginning but once you are into the subject, the best way to keep learning is by analizing and sharing success and fail cases.

Really good articles to have a taste of what design thinking can get for you:

Courses to get started with design thinking:

“How to run a great workshop” by Nikki Highmore Sims is a good guide to help you find out which type of facilitator you are and give you some advice and ideas to structure your workshops and training sessions.

As Donald Norman suggested in his book “Emotional Design“, some ways to get inspiration for creativity are observing and taking things from one domain to the other so don´t get stuck too much on reading about design thinking and start applying it from minute one to your own life.